


The Knowledge of the Unknown

by rakel



Category: Sherlock (TV)
Genre: Character Study, Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-10-08
Updated: 2012-10-08
Packaged: 2017-11-15 22:12:12
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 767
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/532327
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/rakel/pseuds/rakel
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>He does not care for it.</p>
            </blockquote>





	The Knowledge of the Unknown

**Author's Note:**

> Written at the beginning of 2012. Beta read by a wonderful lady, thanks for the tenth time.

There is a saying - probably accredited to the wrong source, and most likely mutated into something beyond recognition since its creation – that wisdom is first and foremost acknowledgement of how much one doesn't know.

Sherlock does not consider himself wise. His experiences of the unknown differ too greatly from the norm, and wouldn't correctly represent what speakers of modern English call wisdom. Perhaps there one day will be words for his experiences.

The knowledge of the unknown makes itself known to Sherlock through the white spots on the map. They've been starkly apparent almost as long as he's been self-aware. An answer to a question would only yield so much in terms of conveyed and useful information. He could never properly catalogue in words his observations of the most insignificant objects and as many pages there were in a book, they could never compare to those never written.

When details come together in a coherent picture as fast as they do for people like Sherlock (Mycroft) the dead ends crop up quickly; the logical fallacies, the weak arguments, the hairline cracks in assumptions and theories. And if you know where to push, any wall will crumble, opening into uncharted territory.

There are a lot of these dead ends. Some go unnoticed; some are purposefully built to satisfy someone, even carefully tended to although a second glance would make them topple.

Then there are the open roads, where the rubble of old walls lies unnoticed, where nobody has bothered to take the first step into the unknown. Almost as if to  _spite_ him.

So, yes. Sherlock is, in the strictest sense of the word, wise. He does not care for it.

He has mapped out towns and cities, simulations of reality, driven by an inner force seemingly in no need of replenishing. Despite this, it would not be feasible in his lifetime to break through all the dead ends he knows of. Instead he picks them he finds most useful for his goals ( _stave off the boredom, just find something, anything that keeps it at bay and keep at it until the body breaks and he thinks no more_ ) and gets to work with them, mapping the unfamiliar landscape on his own. Drinking data, constructing theories and conducting experiments.

He has only turned to introspection when he finds himself without challenges. But unless aided by various chemical substances ( _turns him off, like a computer on standby_ ), his body begins itching, the walls of his cranium crushing the brain inside ( _sensory overload, no use of the information constantly pouring into him, filling him to the brim, reducing him to an empty container standing at the bottom of a waterfall_ ).

The problem with memorising things the first time you hear them, is that a second repeat can at most serve as a confirmation that you committed the correct facts to memory, while the tenth repetition is the tenth stroke of sandpaper across naked skin. Social norms, bodily functions, daily habits, all repeated  _in absurdum_ , until they lose even the illusion of meaning or pleasure.

Crime has a tendency to keep his focus. Not in itself, the concept's continued existence is as grating a fact to him as the sun's continued cycles, but because it implies imbalance, desperation, the snap and crackle of that which normally frustrates him with its continuity and predictability, on and on into eternity. Crime takes the dull mind of one of the living bodies walking past him on the street, and gives it a colour, a flame.  _What does the perpetrator do? Why does he do it? How does he do it? And how does the victim respond to such an extreme situation? What do they think? How do they act?_  In the last moments of their meaningless, empty lives ( _because it is and why don't people see it – stupid_ ), what do people  _do_?

People, yes. Sherlock is an observer of people. The never-ending game.

Had he gone into physics, the technology to prove his theories' existence could be centuries into the future.

Had he gone into history, his theorisation might be foiled by documents lost centuries into the past.

Thus he turns to people. Because they are everywhere, they are here and now while Sherlock lives and breathes and thinks - each one a representative example of the whole, because he does not care about the group, the family, the nation and what the individual says about them. He only cares what the individual says for itself.

_You find yourself in a dead end. Do you break through the wall?_

"Oh god, yes."

And he smiles.


End file.
